As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.
Applications are often developed and deployed at multiple locations such as a remote server or a cloud service provider. Deploying an application often requires bundling a collection of software artifacts and then transmitting the artifacts to a remote location. Oftentimes, a client may wish to make modifications to the remotely deployed application. In conventional systems, the client needs to upload a new copy of the application or a large collection of software artifacts that may be similar to the previous version to the remote server or the cloud service provider so that the server may be running the new version of the application. Since transmitting large artifacts may be slow due to the large file size, repeatedly uploading similar collections or successive versions of a collection of files may be inefficient, expensive, and time-consuming for the client. Moreover, the remote location may be located behind a firewall or may have other barriers preventing the transmission of artifacts. These factors may make deployments a burden to developer productivity. The burden may be magnified for developers practicing iterative or incremental development due to a need to frequently perform deployments. There is a need for faster ways to perform this transfer such that the process may be more efficient.